Ours being the first class in over 140 years, anything was possible in our future careers as doctors. What would any of us choose? I believed that I could forge a career in any branch of medicine. Yet, I was determined to have a career in primary care. So, after one year of a rotating internship I was ready to begin my career as a GP. 

My wife, Starr, and our young family moved on to Tennessee in 1977, where I was initially the solo practitioner for a family monastery, AKA hippie commune of >1000 people adjacent to an Amish community that we also served with the midwives in our community. … After five-and-a-half years, I made the move to emergency medicine, where I could reliably count on my time at home with Starr and our 4 children. 

We moved to California in 1982, where I continued practicing ER medicine for 26 years before making the move into a practice devoted to cannabis medicine as California led the nation in providing legal cannabis approvals to our patients with AIDS, epilepsies, and scores of other serious medical problems. I joined a handful of other physicians in 1999 as cofounders of what is known as the Society of Cannabis Clinicians, dedicated to patient care and education of clinicians and the public in the medical uses of cannabis. I presided over that non-profit organization for more than a decade. I joined several organizations with related missions that led to the opportunity to speak at cannabis conferences around the world for the past 25 years. 

Now, with the epidemics in autism and dementias worldwide, there is a great need for our counsel as physicians in the use of cannabis in patient care. Our profession is unable to educate physicians about the basic physiology and pathology of the endo-cannabinoid system and in my opinion, the utility of this plant medicine as a first-line rather than a last resort for mitigating the agitated behaviors of these tragic conditions. Dean Aronson told me many years ago that lack of education about the endo-cannabinoid system and the therapeutic uses of cannabis is because of the competition for the minutes of educational curricula for medical students. I remain in my medical practice because of the unmet needs for the use of cannabis as medicine.